The session began with Stephen Gardner, Executive Vice President for Planning, Technology and Public Affairs for Amtrak, offering his perspective from his experience in America.

Andrew Haines, Chief Executive of the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) presented next. He joined the CAA after a wide-ranging career in the rail industry and used experience in both rail and air sectors to draw comparisons.

Howard Smith, Crossrail’s Operations Director and Chief Operating Officer for Rail at Transport for London explored lessons learned from his experience of London’s railways and contrasted the benefits of privatisation and competition with also the contribution of a stable and empower public sector.

Discussion on the presentations focused on the lessons to be learned from each other, the benefits of collaboration, of deregulation, and the difficulty stemming from fragmentation. Howard emphasised that it becomes easier to incentivise the industry towards the benefit of customers through a more collaborative railway.

Key themes

Four common themes emerged from the presentations and the Q&A discussion:

The challenge of capacity cannot be ignored, and needs collective understanding and action to resolve constraints.

Creating delivery approaches which further fragment, complicate or harden rights and obligations, without ability to be flexed, would make the challenge of responding to the market and to stakeholders more difficult and more expensive.

There is a need to empower management to act by removing unnecessary ‘noise’ of intra-modal conflicts.

Freeing the industry from political interference and detailed and over-burdensome regulation could help to stimulate new approaches to delivering the outcomes Government wanted.